Tonight after church Laura, KT and I went to a coffee shop called Neutral Ground with an older couple in the church, Ann and Wayne Arnold. They are awesome!!! They know the coolest places like coffee shops, restaurants, etc in New Orleans and they are so young at heart. We all love them so much. We're going with them to Snug Harbor on Friday...another place with live music and good coffee. The interesting thing about Neutral Grounds is that it is technically a business, but it doesn't make any money really. All the people that work there are volunteers and the coffee is cheap...pretty much sold at cost. It is an amazing place with a shelf full of an awesome variety of books and a corner of games like scrabble and monopoly; good, no frills music, and good coffee too...or so says KT =) so we were enthralled by the place and we vowed to come back...speaking of which i have to find it on the map so we can get back to it later on.
So...this week has been a jumble of plans and actuality. Fred had planned on us doing some more ministry-type work this week and some real stuff for Operation Nehemiah. However, he has been reprimanded over the way he handles some of the church operations. It's a long story and I don't really want to put it all on here but basically it isn't anyone's fault, mainly the usual suspect of people not being willing to put their own agenda aside and try to see things from someone else's point of view. So the fallout of this is that we, as interns, are getting to do a lot more hands-on stuff. We like this, of course, but Fred is kinda wishing that we could be doing more for him. We are painting classrooms for the first sunday school classes since the storm at church, clearing walkways through the equipment to them, organizing some stuff, and other odd jobs. Another repercussion of this is that Brenda, the secretary here, is basically leaving after this week...which means that we are going to have to be the secretaries. Thankfully, Laura likes doing that kind of work so KT and I won't have to force ourselves in there too often, but still, we aren't getting as much training as Fred would have liked because we have so much other work to do.
KT and Perry (the lady in the church that does basically all of the children's ministry) chose the colors for the classroom and they are really neat...bold but not primary blue, green, and yellow colors and I think they are going to look great. We finished the green room today, it is the biggest so that is a good thing. We have to prime the yellow room and wait for the drywall to finish drying but the nursery doesn't have to be primed so we can go right ahead with the pretty blue/turquoise.
Last night us girls and brenda and her husband Craig and Bob had a study that Tim Martin (no, not the one from First Day and Mountain Home) teaches. It has little business cards that you put in order of how you see your journey to faith. We basically just got started but it looks like it could be pretty cool.
The guys here from Ohio are really nice...Dave, Gary, Wayne, and Bill. All very different personality wise and I love seeing them together. They have been such a help to Ronn and James I think.
I will tell you one thing I love about Fred Franke. He is an insanely busy man and he has to run all over town doing all sorts of things. Despite all this, he still makes time to show us his favorite restaurants and places...like Ro-Bears snoballs...incredible...and Zeas bread pudding, and today, we went to Smoothie King and got some awesome smoothies with him.
Tonight after we left Neutral Ground Ann and Wayne drove us by this sweet little restaurant down Carrolton called Jacques-Imo...you walk into a bar, then you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the dining area! it is so cool and we all picked up applications--it was a pretty hopping place for a wednesday night but it is small and I don't know how good the tips would be. Zeas seems to be a really good place right now but it's a drive...i just don't know which one would be better, i guess we'll see.
I really hope gas keeps going down because i have pretty much NONE right now...haha
ok, KT and I are going to go paint because we are excited!